Why Coull is putting brand safety first (and why you should too)

2018 will be the year we all put brand safety first...

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What do they say to you before you hop on to a rollercoaster? Safety first! Now, it’s also a phrase that can be applied to digital advertising and brand safety - and what a rollercoaster ride the ad industry has been on recently.

Hence, why the main focus from 2018 onwards should be about putting brand safety first.

So, what can be done to improve brand safety in the digital ad industry?

Industry standards are the key that opens up the doors to trust

The most important thing is working with completely transparent and trusted partners. The vital building block in any relationship is trust. So why would a business partnership be any different?

Companies should be seeking industry body accreditation to give their partners peace of mind.The IAB have launched their Gold Standard initiative, with the aim to reduce ad fraud, improve the digital advertising experience and increase brand safety.

A part of the Gold Standard is becoming a JICWEBS signatory and adhering to the DTSG brand safety principles. The aim of the Good Practice Principles is to improve transparency in the UK digital advertising market, giving brands more confidence that their advertising will reach the right audience in a brand safe way.

On our journey to gaining the IAB Gold Standard and showing our own dedication to brand safety, we’ve partnered with JICWEBS and have recently been awarded our brand safety seal of compliance!

We earnt this through our transparency in the digital ad industry and our dedication to our compliance process. We have invested in and improved our proprietary technology to ensure anti-fraud and brand safety. Our dedicated compliance team and partnerships with industry-leading verification vendors ensure a very comprehensive compliance process.

Check before you buy

There are certain things you can check out before partnering with a company, such as, if they are a reputable company, what their domains and content is like, if they have their own brand safety policy and if they have official accreditation.

Pre-boarding checks are an important part of Coull’s compliance process. Prior to signing contracts, all inventory is human vetted by Coull’s dedicated compliance team and verified as safe, or rejected – at which point further talks with the supply partner will be terminated. The example of what we look for when we filter are: ghost sites, illegal content, graphic violence, the IP reputation, botnets, the viewability of inventory and lots more.

If we are happy with the company and their domains, we can then think about partnering. At this point, the company must agree to comply with our policies, including our brand safety policy.Whitelists

Keeping up with the countless sites out there and filtering between the brand safe and the unsavoury, all whilst fast-moving fraudsters wait in the sidelines, can become a bit of a ‘cat and mouse’ game. However, whitelists are an effective way to navigate in the wild web. A whitelist is a list of approved and acceptable sites to run campaigns on.

As well as our pre-boarding checks, we analyse and categorise supply inventory that is human-verified. This creates a whitelisted inventory pool that demand partners may opt to buy from. This double verification provides a deeper level of invalid domain detection.

The human element

In a highly technologically world, digital advertising needs some element of human judgement. No matter how much you try to automate a process with technology, it’s unlikely a machine will ever truly know what ‘brand safety’ is because it’s a subjective term and the meaning will change with the times.

Coull employs both human and technological approaches to identify and prevent ads being delivered into content environments that may pose a risk to brand image. Bringing technology and human elements in at the right points in the compliance process means we can all bask in the brand safety glory.

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Brand safety is at the forefront of our minds so that all of our partners have full trust in us and we hope that it encourages the rest of the industry to follow suit.